today's question

Childhood is a time of trauma. Parents do the most bizarre things to their kids, like make them wear no-frills jeans when everyone else is wearing Levi's or dragging you to the circus when you are way too old for that kind of thing. So tell us, what's the most embarassing thing your parents did to you when you were young that will force you into therapy someday?

Comments

my mother went through a phase during which time she was suspicious about pin worms, and used to come into our rooms at night to check us while we slept and wake us up, and we'd see the flashlight and the strip of scotch tape and say, oh, not again, mom.

A friend of my Grandma's sexually molested me at 12 years old and i told my grandma(she didnt believe me) and she told my mother who went and questioned the guy who did it and he had this REALLY great excuse/alibi whatever...

anyway my mother and father made me apologise to this animal for telling a lie about him.To this day i still am looking him up and he WILL recieve a visit from me one day when i find him.Im hoping to find his wife first....

The silly answer is, they kept me so sheltered that I had no idea what the usual four-letter words were about, sexual innuendos, rude gestures ... and the other kids figured that out.

The therapy answer is, we were always on the edge financially, and one time I wanted to use $2 I got for my birthday to buy a meal ticket to buy my lunch at school for a week [be like the other kids, basically], and when I went to my piggy bank, the $2 wasn't there. I told my mom and she said she'd taken it to make the house payment, and that she'd planned to put it back but hadn't been able to yet.

Scared the ever loving shit out of me when it came to money that my parents were desperate enough to take that $2. I still worry about finances when everything is fine. :P

I lived close enough to the elementary school to walk home for lunch. My mother had a day job and my father had an evening job, which put him in charge of all dietary and apparel decisions.

He leaned more towards the practical than the fashionable, so even if you escaped in the morning, he still had a shot at alterations and additons at lunchtime.

As a matter of fact, I lost my first boyfriend because I had to return for the afternoon session completely rubberized - boots, raincoat, plastic rain bonnet - no body part left exposed to the elements. Stanley G. used all of his 5th grade wiles to make small talk to the object of his affection (me) by reporting a test score of mine he had seen.

I was in such a foul mood from being forced into protective clothing against my will, that I snapped at him: "Who Cares?" and the romance was over.

The thing that comes to mind is the time when I was about 14, and my parents found a small baggie of pot in my room (incidently, hidden there by my little brother - oh the ingenuity!) So they call a meeting of all the parents on our street (because, of course, we only hung out with people on our own street) and made everyone sit in our living room and discuss the "drug problem" in our neighbourhood. Good God, I can still picture Dad sifting through the weed with his fingers, trying to be cool and telling everyone "it's mostly seeds and stems - it's not even good stuff." I think the meeting was Mum's idea and my Dad was as upset by us not getting a good value as he was about the ganja. Any way, all the other parents and kids just kind of sat there silent, with a really embarrased look...not that THEY were embarrased, but more like they were embarrased for my Mum trying to set up this stree-wide "stamp out drugs" campaign based on this crappy little dime bag - and embarrased for my brother and I, of course.

Nothing ever came of it, but man that was awkward.The ironic thing is Mum pops quite a cocktail of valium/prozac/etc...but it's OK because "they come from a doctor."

He had that rare weird electricity about him -- that extremely wild and
heavy presence that you only see in a person who has abandoned all hope
of ever behaving normally.
-- Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing '72Texas Holdem http://www.texas-holdem-poker-casino.com